In recent years, as the demand for indoor voice communication and data communication has grown due to the spread of mobile phones, the development of a home-use base station that can be installed inside a building such as a user's house and a small-scale office has been pursued. Since an area covered by the base station that can be installed indoors is considerably smaller than that of an existing base station installed outdoor, the area is called “femtocell”. Hereinafter, a base station forming a femtocell is called “femto base station”.
Femto base stations as well as base stations in existing mobile communication networks transmit a common pilot signal. A mobile station performs synchronization establishment, channel estimation, and the like by receiving a common pilot signal, and thereby performs data transmission/reception with a base station. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to receive a common pilot signal with good receiving quality in a mobile station in order to provide good communication quality.
In base stations in existing mobile communication networks, the transmission power of a common pilot signal to be transmitted in each cell is set to a fixed value. In contrast to this, as for common pilot signals transmitted by femto base stations in femtocells, a way of autonomously setting the transmission power by a femto base station has been studied. For example, Patent document 1 (page 14, line 8 to page 15, line 21) discloses such a method.
A specific example of a transmission power setting method for a femto base station disclosed in Patent document 1 is explained hereinafter with reference to FIG. 10. In FIG. 10, a macro base station 811 forms a macrocell 801 and transmits a common pilot signal CP1 with a constant transmission power to communicate with a mobile station (not shown). Femto base stations 812A and 812B form femtocells 802A and 802B respectively to communicate with a mobile station(s) (not shown). Further, each of the femto base stations 812A and 812B measures a received power Pmacro [dBm] of the common pilot signal CP1 of the macro base station 811, and they transmit common pilot signals CP2A and CP2B respectively with a transmission power Pmacro+Poffset [dBm] by using the same radio frequency band as that of the macro base station 811. Note that Poffset is a power offset, and is a constant value common to all the femtocells 802A and 802B.
The femto base station like the one described above has been studied for use in systems such as W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) and E-UTRAN (also called “LTE: Long Term Evolution”). In W-CDMA, data transmission is performed by using a dedicated channel, of which transmission power is controlled, on the uplink and the downlink, or is performed by using a shared channel on the downlink as described in 3GPP TS 25.214 V7.3.0. Further, in E-UTRAN, a radio frequency band is divided into a plurality of PRBs (Physical Resource Blocks) as described in 3GPP TS 36.300 V8.1.0. Specifically, a scheduler provided in an E-UTRAN base station assigns PRBs, and a base station performs data transmission with a mobile station by using an assigned PRB.
[Patent Document 1]
    UK Patent Application Publication No. 2428937 A